I’m in a similar situation, we’ve been trying to make it back to WDW for a while, but life keeps getting in the way. We have 5-day tickets that we keep pushing out. After our last attempt in September got cancelled, I booked a hotel room for the week after Christmas, but since that date’s ticket price was much higher than what I originally paid, I didn’t do park reservations, figuring we’d cancel again.
Well, it now looks like we can go right after Christmas. But no park reservations available. Then last week, they added one park per day. Just EPCOT, so I booked three days of EPCOT, one AK and got MK on Saturday January 1st. Figured we might just have upgrade to Park Hopper and go to HS in the afternoon.
I’ve been checking park reservation availability calendar several times per day.
At 6 AM EST this morning, I checked, and HS was available for 12/27. I was able to change from EPCOT to HS. But now it is gone.
Emboldened by my success, I tried to get an earlier MK park reservation. Despite what the calendar said, I was able to change my two EPCOT days on 12/28 & 12/29 to MK. I did switch back to EPCOT for one day, so I went from 3 days of EPCOT, one of AK & MK, no HS to two days at MK, one each of EPCOT, HS & AK.
I personally prefer HS at night! I think SDD is much more fun with the lights on the ride. GE clears out more at night and you can take your time looking around and shopping. Hopping to it sounds like an excellent plan.
My first time back in around 15 years and my kids have never been, so it’ll be exciting. Only one day for both parks, but we will be picky with rides.
I got nauseous when I saw the prices for Express passes… it was more than the ticket. But I kept telling myself, “you’ve cancelled an entire trip incl hotels and travels this year, just spend the extra few hundred…”.
Can you get a one night reservation at a premier hotel either the night before or after your visit? Since you mentioned kids plural there might be enough of you to make that cheaper. Up to 5 people get express passes with a premier room.
I’ve read that some people have the experience of being switched to a cheaper room when they tell the check-in that they are just there for the express passes. It happens when they have availability on suites and booked solid on the standard rooms.
What they do is lock the door in a suite between the bedroom and living room. The person there for just the express passes gets the ‘parlor.’
For MOST* convention sites, multiple park day tix over there aren’t tied to a date (even if they ask you for one), and for 4 day PH tix are about $120 less than Disney’s price right now.
*I said MOST above because on rare instances, a convention site link will shunt you into a sort of limbo-Disney ticket page that looks like it is a convention page, but really is using the regular ticket site. Before I realized this was an older thread, I just checked one December convention page that would sell you tickets, but at full price!
Then I checked another convention site and got the expected discounted ticket price (with additional water park and more day tacked on.)
Nope, once you add them to your MDE they just look like regular tix.
There are partial day ticket options at convention sites too, but over the last year those really jumped up in price and aren’t often worth it IMHO. ($96 for a partial day? nuts to that.)
The up side: multi day convention tix are still not tied to dates, so you can use them whenever, regardless of convention dates. They also still have the old 14-day use policy, so if you plan to have some down days in the middle of a trip you have more flexibility than regular tickets smaller windows.
You also get that free water park and more day.
Some cons: recently there was a change in at least some convention ticket pages where conventions starting in 2022 also had a START use date - so you couldn’t buy tickets for a January 2022 convention and use them this month, e.g.
The fine print says nothing about the start use date, so an argument might be made that you weren’t aware of the issue and guest services might change them for you - but I just suggest people buy tickets for the conventions occurring in the same year you are planning to be in park.
Oh, another up side of the tix: if you buy those 2022 convention tickets, at least some seem to have expiration dates into FEB 2023. That could be a good tactic to head off any future (likely) ticket increased if you knew you were going to have a trip that far out.
I have a ton of notes in this long-running convention tickets thread if you are a glutton for punishment. I try to keep the first 2 posts up to date with bullet points. A lot of the posts in the middle likely have outdated info, but the later posts are probably still useful.
Just for fun, I found a convention that is in July 2022, and used that as a jumping point to see how much the tickets would save over what I paid from UT.
It appears that it would have saved me about an additional $90 for two tickets (or $45 each), not including the value of the water park and more, which is hard to do an exact comparison to since you can’t buy such a ticket from UT directly. The closest is the Park Hopper Plus ticket. If you use that as the comparison, then the savings is more like $70 per person.
This post gave me major anxiety today about getting my tickets and reservations sorted, and I didn’t read the whole thing until I worked through all my kinks and have everything booked. Now I wish I read earlier about these convention tickets! Always learning something… Thanks for the tip!
Also OP - so glad this all worked out for you. My stomach started hurting when I read this!
I’ll use my rollercoaster thread for random questions:
We’re checking in tomorrow evening and going to MK early sunday morning - apparently now 07.00 for the extended emh which is good for us! This is my first time (in recent years) without having complimentary or existing magic bands in advance, what should I do to get into the park conveniently?
I’m still considering we buy magic bands in the evening, but what are the other options? I am the only one with the app on my phone.
This is good, I wasn’t sure if a phone/app was readable. I think we will be fine with one readable device so the cards should be sufficient for ticket use
I would do a test with the phone to make sure it is reliable. We had our phones and Magic Bands in October so I wasn’t worried. When they debuted the new system (ie your ticket living on your phone) they said it would work w/ Photopass but, …Disney IT.
Thanks for the tip!